Kawaii Japanese for everyday life

The English language is no stranger to being infiltrated by loan words from other languages. As far back as the days of Old English, when there was enormous influence from the Viking invaders, English has always found room for new words and more ways to express similar concepts (e.g. maternal and motherly) and this continues to this day. In particular, I’ve noticed that recently, due to the rising popularity of Japanese culture in English-speaking countries, there has been an influx of Japanese loanwords in English. Sugoi! (That’s pretty much the Japanese equivalent of ‘awesome’.)

Pop culture, technology, and sociology

Recent additions include terms from anime and manga (both of which are borrowed from Japanese) such as hentai, otaku, kawaii, and shojo. Older additions include technologically-related tamagotchi (remember those?!) and keitai. From sociology, there are words such as hikikomori or karoshi, and of course the much older harakiri and seppuku (let’s hope none of our readers feel inspired to do this!). The table below shows the meanings and origins of these words:

Word

Meaning

Origin

hentai

sexually explicit subgenre of anime and manga

変態 abnormal, perverted

otaku

fanatic of something (such as computers or manga)

御宅 （オタク）your house, a formal and polite 2nd person pronoun

kawaii

cute

可愛い cute

shojo

genre of manga and anime aimed at a young female audience

少女 girl

tamagotchi

an electronic toy ‘digital pet’

たまごっち = たまご egg + ウオッチ watch

keitai

mobile phone

携帯 portable (short for 携帯電話 ‘mobile phone’)

hikikomori

abnormal avoidance of social contact

引き籠もり staying indoors, (social) withdrawal

karoshi

death caused by overwork or job-related exhaustion

過労死 = 過 excess + 労 labour + 死 death

hara-kiri

ritual suicide

腹切り = 腹 abdomen + 切り cutting

seppuku

another term for hara-kiri

切腹 = 切 to cut + 腹 abdomen

Foodies

Food is another arena where English has borrowed gluttonously from Japanese. You can relax with your friends at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) or onsen (hot spring) in comfortable yukata (light cotton kimonos) and enjoy the kaiseki (traditional Japanese cuisine) smorgasbord. Or, if you prefer, some crispy gyoza (potstickers) and some piping hot yakitori (chicken skewers) at an izakaya (Japanese pub). Sushi and wasabi are ever popular, while tsukemono (pickled vegetables) remains less well known. Ramen (noodles) are always a popular student choice, but if you’re in the mood for Japanese noodles, you can also have soba (noodles made from buckwheat flower) or udon (thick wheat noodles).

Wax on… Wax off…

Of course, most people associate Japanese with martial arts, and there are plenty of words such as aikido, kendo, dojo, katana, karate, and ju-jitsu that come from Japanese. I was also surprised to note quite a few business terms: aside from the obvious Nikkei, there’s zaibatsu (conglomerate) and kaizen (business philosophy of continuous improvement) as well. And that’s before we even get started on philosophy and religion – there are dozens of loan words from these areas too. It’s not all work and no play, though – there are plenty of familiar loan words for games. We could play pachinko, do some Sudoku, sing some karaoke, or fold some origami. If you’ve got kids, we could always play Pokemon! For those in for something more cultured, we could go watch kabuki or noh theatre.

Masaka! (‘No way, Jose!’)

I’ll leave you today to speculate which of the following words have come from Japanese:

Funnily enough, my 18 year old just used the word “hikikomori” in his status yesterday. I hadn’t heard it before then.

I didn’t know that honcho and karaoke were Japanese based. How interesting. :)

Kimberly Long

Oh that was a fun artilcle! I love using kawaii as it just seems so much more expressive than cute…

Thanks for the great informative artile…I feel smarted already! :)

Robert Belton

Do you have any citation or reference that the slang term otaku オタク in Japanese alludes to a reluctance to leave the house? I think you are conflating it with hikikomori. Prior to its adoption as slang in the mid eighties it was just a polite 2nd person pronoun.

It’s worth pointing out that while otaku is neutral in English, as it is generally used by fans to refer to themselves, in Japanese it has similar negative connotations as “anorak” in British English. Fan ファン (from the English) would seem to be the more neutral term.

Ashley Wagner

I pulled in the etymological information from Oxford Dictionaries Online, which base their research on corpus evidence and the OED. However for this entry, it does appear the ODO etymology got mistakenly extrapolated from the OED etymology which gives much fuller coverage. The editorial team will reconsider this etymology. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

As for the negative connotation of otaku in Japanese, I focused on Japanese-origin words used in English. As always with foreign borrowings, differences of nuance arise between the original meaning and the adopted meaning in another language.